Your employees are talking to customers every day. But how do we leverage these personal and frequent conversations to uncover problem areas, discover new product ideas and identify trends? The highly popular Spanish retail chain, Zara, taps into its store managers on a regular basis to understand how customers feel about its products. Managers are trained to ask customers about comfort, style and how future designs may work better to meet their needs. Taking time to listen to its frontline employees is not only the right thing to do, but it has yielded tangible business results as well—it has allowed Zara “to limit failed product introductions to just one percent (the industry averages nearly ten percent) while producing nearly ten times the number of products as its largest competitors”(Source: Harvard Business Review, 2013).

The concepts of employee empowerment and customer journey mapping (i.e. where does the journey start, how do we collect feedback, how do we identify key moments) are not new. However, the proliferation of cloud and mobile technologies has changed what this means for companies, which you can read about in my last blog.

EMC’s Customer Advocacy team has been investigating the link between employees and customer journey mapping for some time. Our analysis has found that most key moments in the customer journey can be observed, but the real issue is how to capture them. If something is important to a customer, she is not going to wait for an online survey to share her perspective. Rather, she will most likely express her feelings to the person she interacts with most, such as a representative from sales or customer service. Thousands of customers and partners also interact with EMC employees at industry events, including EMC World, which is expected to have nearly in-person 10,000 attendees.

With all of these customer touch points, we need to not only have a scalable program available to capture feedback, but also a streamlined process to ensure that this data is shared with the right cross-functional teams in a timely manner, analyzed for common trends and ultimately allows us to tell the customer what actually happened based on what they told us. EMC’s solution is a program called “VIA” or Voice Insight Action. Hosted via a mobile app, this program allows customer facing employees to capture “in the moment” feedback in three categories: improvements, strengths and ideas. EMC’s Total Customer Experience team will pilot this program with customers at EMC World next week and then roll it out to our front-line teams later this year.

Increase customer feedback opportunities: By sharing feedback when they want to, customers and partners will not have to wait for a transactional or quarterly survey to provide their comments.

Increase employee feedback frequency: Traditionally, EMC has surveyed our employees at specified times throughout the year to get a general sense of customer satisfaction and concerns from their perspective through our “Voice of Field” program. But many of these people are dealing with multiple customers and multiple people within customer accounts every day. The VIA program allows any employee in the company to capture an important moment that otherwise would have been missed.

Increase transparency and information-sharing, both internally and externally: All of the data collected through the VIA program will be stored in a central database where it can be analyzed and acted upon by relevant teams. Critical moments, positive or negative, can be flagged and reviewed by program managers to drive process, service and product improvements, as well as to help us reach back out to customers to better understand the sentiment, implement a remediation plan if there is a serious issue and provide an update as to how we have acted on their feedback. Having a centralized repository of feedback will allow EMC to map changes over time as well as give customer-facing teams more detailed analysis on what their specific customer accounts may be sharing with EMC teams around the world. This type of customized data will allow EMC teams to have more personalized conversations and demonstrate that we are truly in touch with customer pain points and needs.

I am excited to see what the VIA program can do for EMC’s business. One thing I know for sure is that our employees are critical to ensuring we understand what our customers want and need. As the Zara example illustrates and what we believe at EMC, taking time to listen matters and it is can make a serious difference to your business results.

If you are attending EMC World, I hope you will stop by the Total Customer Experience booth (#463) to share your feedback with our team members. And if you can’t make the event, I hope you will tell us how you want us to continue to improve through this special online discussion and when your local EMC teams present the VIA program to you in the coming months.

]]>https://infocus.dellemc.com/vj_manickam/a-new-era-of-real-time-customer-experience-insights/feed/0https://infocus.dellemc.com/wp-content/themes/the-box/images/categories/service-excellence.pngPart 3: Cloud and the Customer Experience – Employee & Partner Empowermenthttps://infocus.dellemc.com/vj_manickam/cloud_and_the_customer_experience/
https://infocus.dellemc.com/vj_manickam/cloud_and_the_customer_experience/#commentsThu, 16 Apr 2015 13:00:42 +0000https://infocus.dellemc.com/?p=23262The final segment in this three-part series focuses on how to empower the people that drive the customer experience—employees and partners. How you equip these two groups to deliver a great customer experience is critical—they are the ones who can ensure that what you say about your brand through your marketing messaging aligns with the […]

]]>The final segment in this three-part series focuses on how to empower the people that drive the customer experience—employees and partners. How you equip these two groups to deliver a great customer experience is critical—they are the ones who can ensure that what you say about your brand through your marketing messaging aligns with the actual customer experience. Companies should not expect to delight their customers without investing in the culture and infrastructure to allow employees and partners to own the customer experience. The cloud provides an unprecedented level of insight and collaboration that these key groups can use to satisfy customers throughout their end-to-end journey.

Netflix uses Google Apps to give its employees a way to collaborate and access information irrespective of location. In doing so, the company’s leaders believe they’re giving employees a way to act on new ideas more quickly. Ecosystem connectivity enables information exchange across business partners. About a third of survey respondents like how cloud better facilitates external collaboration with partners and customers cited in the Economist-IBM report. HealthHiway is an online health information network that enables the exchange of health information and transactions among healthcare providers, employers, payers, practitioners, third-party administrators and patients in India. “By connecting more than 1,100 hospitals and 10,000 doctors, the company’s software-as-a-service solution facilitates better collaboration and information sharing, helping deliver improved care at a low cost, particularly important in growing markets.”

I believe that employees and partners need three freedoms to ensure that the customer experience ecosystem thrives:

User-friendly tools to capture feedback “in the moment”. Companies often have trouble capitalizing on the knowledge of all their customer-facing employees, especially when they are dispersed across expansive geographic regions . This is because many of those employees — like waiters and flight attendants — do not generally have access to cloud communication tools. EMC recognizes the value of these interactions and will pilot the “Voice Insight Action (VIA)” tool at this year’s EMC World event (expected to draw 10,000 attendees) using a tablet mobile app and allowing customers to share their feedback using a microphone that translates voice-to-text. The team will then refine the tool and make it available to global employees. By aggregating data collected using this tool, EMC will be able to identify common trends and pain points across customer accounts to ensure that new ideas are surfaced to the appropriate teams and corrective actions are put in place for large-scale issues.

Analytics insights to make better decisions at the moment of truth. Giving employees and partners access to a central view of the customer by drawing on multiple data sources can be difficult. However, the agility of the cloud has significantly reduced this challenge without compromising customer or business security. Several teams at EMC are working together to connect disparate systems and data sources to create a 360-view of the customer. One example is the “End to End Dashboard” built by EMC’s Total Customer Experience team. This dashboard uses Tableau software to provide a clean and valuable view of the customer across multiple dimensions—revenue, loyalty, customer satisfaction—and allows employees and partners to compare an individual account experience compared to historical trends and similar peers. This dashboard will also be featured in EMC’s Total Customer Experience booth (463) at EMC World to show customers how we are using big data to better understand their needs.

Social technologies to support collaboration and knowledge-sharing. The advent of social media engagement is a great opportunity for companies to change how they share information with employees and partners and interact with customers. The EMC Community Network is a robust online platform that has 300,000+ registered users. This is a mobile ready social platform that allows customers, partners, and employees to access key information on topics that matter to them. Customers can use this community to receive timely and complete answers to questions from both EMC technical experts and partners. In addition to the public accessibility of this online community, EMC has also built private sections exclusively for groups, such as partners. An example is a special section open to VSPEX BLUE (one of EMC’s newest converged infrastructure technologies) partners where they can access the latest product documentation and training.

If your company is not thinking about how to activate employees and partners through the cloud…well, it’s time to do so…at least if your goal is to be an industry leader. The disruptive nature of the cloud reveals a unique opportunity to transform the customer experience. Of course, any technology innovation cannot replace the need to hire and train your best brand

ambassadors—employees and partners—to act as independent problem-solvers who are passionate and know how to advocate in the customer’s best interest.

Throughout this series we have looked at many innovative examples of how companies are using the cloud to improve the customer experience. I am always looking more great stories. If you would like to share yours or hear more about EMC’s let’s start a conversation in the comments below.

This is the final blog in a three-part series on how cloud technologies are transforming the customer experience and the ecosystem that surrounds it. Part 1 discusses how the cloud changes the dynamics of business strategies and both challenges and presents new opportunities for CIOs and IT organizations. Part 2 illustrates the cloud’s impact on how customers and companies digitally interact with each other. Finally, Part 3 (this blog) provides insights on how the cloud changes the ways employees and partners shape the customer experience.

]]>https://infocus.dellemc.com/vj_manickam/cloud_and_the_customer_experience/feed/1https://infocus.dellemc.com/wp-content/themes/the-box/images/categories/multi-cloud.pngPart 2: Cloud and the Customer Experience – The New Digital Erahttps://infocus.dellemc.com/vj_manickam/cloud-and-the-customer-experience-the-new-digital-era/
https://infocus.dellemc.com/vj_manickam/cloud-and-the-customer-experience-the-new-digital-era/#respondThu, 12 Mar 2015 13:06:48 +0000https://infocus.dellemc.com/?p=2289789% of companies surveyed by Gartner believe that customer experience will be their primary basis for competition by 2016 (Source: Gartner report, Predicts 2015: Digital Marketers Will Monetize Disruptive Forces, December 2014). We are seeing more and more companies who are transforming the customer experience by innovating in digital interactions. Companies need to understand how their […]

Open-source technology allows patients and doctors at MIT to share critical medical information via tablets, mobile phones and computers to drive better health outcomes. At the MIT Media Lab, the New Media Medicine research group is shaking up the health care industry (see page 13 in this report). The group created an open-source technology platform that allows information-sharing across mobile phones, tablets and computers. Patients can access data points that once would have only been available in the doctor’s office from their own homes. They can also add their own new data points (diet, social support, alternative therapies, etc.) so that doctors have a more holistic view of their lifestyle and resources. Together, doctors and patients are leveraging this flexible, cloud-based model to exchange data, share perspectives and ultimately work towards better health outcomes.

Cloud-based Google Maps transforms the experience for FedEx online customers. A blog by a FedEx IT Manager, Pat Doyle, talks about the impact of Google Maps on the customer experience: “To make it even easier for people to find the information they need online, we launched a new store locator site using Google Maps. Using Google Maps, and more specifically Google Maps Engine, allowed us to completely re-imagine FedEx.com. We turned to Maps Engine because it gave us a powerful platform to build and share our own FedEx maps. By integrating features that so many people use everyday, like Google Street View and driving directions, FedEx.com visitors can easily find the nearest FedEx. In addition to providing a much easier way to locate us, Google Maps Engine gives us another big advantage: global accuracy and consistency. Central to the cloud-based offering, we can rely on Google’s core infrastructure to host our always-changing and growing database of store information. By hosting attributes, such as street addresses, opening hours, holiday schedules and local pick-up times on Maps Engine, we can update details for nearly 50,000 retail touchpoints in real-time and share this information to FedEx.com visitors within minutes. This helped us replace a patchwork of region-bound store locators with a single, global site” (Source: Google Blog).

A simple mobile app allows the City of Philadelphia to engage in meaningful, two-way communication with residents. If you think new digital experiences require significant financial investments, think again. The agility of cloud services allows organizations to create and build in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago.
In the city of Philadelphia, it is estimated that 20-30% of residents do not have access to a computer in their household. However, 88% of Philadelphians ages 18-34 and 21% of those 65 and older use their smart phones to access the internet (Source: Pew Charitable Trusts study). Anxious to better connect with its resident base, the city of Philadelphia partnered with Salesforce.com to create a mobile “community cloud” app, which allows residents to log “into the platform to submit service needs, such as request a permit, file a noise complaint, note new graffiti, and more—from their exact location at that moment—similar to checking in on Facebook. Integrated websites and mobile apps give citizens clear visibility of the status of their inquiry as it moves through the system” (Source: Salesforce Blog). As a result of the cloud’s agility, one of the largest cities in the U.S. has found a new way to connect real-time with its residents.

Just a few years ago, business leaders may have been able to ignore the digital experience. However, it is quickly becoming a top-of-mind objective for leaders across the organization—marketing, IT, services and many others. Digital strategies require thoughtfulness and must stay focused on customer needs. Those leaders who expect to succeed in the digital landscape should seriously consider cloud technologies to ensure that their customer experience continues to be personal, relevant and exciting.

_____________________

This is the second blog in a three-part series on how cloud technologies are transforming the customer experience and the ecosystem that surrounds it. Part 1 discusses how the cloud changes the dynamics of business strategies and both challenges and presents new opportunities for CIOs and IT organizations. Part 2 (this blog) illustrates the cloud’s impact on how customers and companies digitally interact with each other. Finally, Part 3 will provide insights on how the cloud changes the ways employees and partners shape the customer experience.

]]>https://infocus.dellemc.com/vj_manickam/cloud-and-the-customer-experience-the-new-digital-era/feed/0https://infocus.dellemc.com/wp-content/themes/the-box/images/categories/multi-cloud.pngPart 1: Cloud and the Customer Experience – A Changing IT Ecosystemhttps://infocus.dellemc.com/vj_manickam/cloud-and-the-customer-experience/
https://infocus.dellemc.com/vj_manickam/cloud-and-the-customer-experience/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 17:09:17 +0000https://infocus.dellemc.com/?p=22409Technology brings tremendous opportunity to all facets of business. However, if neglected or misused, rigid technologies can prevent ecosystems from being responsive to evolving business and customer needs. The role of “the cloud” is dramatically changing the technology landscape. CIOs who want to stay ahead in today’s competitive world must be in tune to what […]

]]>Technology brings tremendous opportunity to all facets of business. However, if neglected or misused, rigid technologies can prevent ecosystems from being responsive to evolving business and customer needs. The role of “the cloud” is dramatically changing the technology landscape. CIOs who want to stay ahead in today’s competitive world must be in tune to what this cloud shift means for IT organizations and the overall customer experience (CX).

A New Perspective On the Cloud
CIOs originally moved software, infrastructure, and app development to the cloud as a cost savings measure. However, company leaders now see the cloud as a conduit for business agility and innovation.

Lowers the business costs of experimentation: Renting infrastructure and applications from cloud service providers lowers the expense of trying new technology, so business leaders are more willing to take risks and innovate to align with customer needs.

Increases the speed of delivering innovations: Standing up cloud services can take days or weeks instead of the months or years we see with on-premise deployments. Therefore, business leaders can quickly identify solutions to customer business challenges and get them in the hands of their stakeholders. At EMC’s premier industry event, “EMC World 2014”, we showed how quickly we can deploy a well-run Hybrid Cloud by building one on the show floor in less than 48 hours. Now that is something that customers can get excited about!

A New Purpose for IT Organizations

The cloud makes it easy for different parts of the business to quickly solve problems. But without coordination, disparate cloud deployments can cause confusion, dissatisfaction and inefficiencies for both internal teams and customers. The IT organization has emerged as the natural facilitator to weave a common thread between cloud efforts. Research firm IDC recently predicted that over 65% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybridcloud before 2016. (Source: International Data Corporations, Dec 2014)

The best CIOs recognize this elevated role and will empower their IT teams to help steward the customer experience:

Leverage IT expertise to validate customer-oriented cloud technologies: Cloud solutions affecting employee productivity, such as Google Apps or Microsoft Office 365, are controlled by IT. That’s because these tools impact the entire workforce. In this new technology era, IT also has an opportunity to share its proven cloud expertise to benefit customers and partners. With the speed offered by cloud technology, IT can more easily spread attention to customer, partner, and internal applications instead of having to choose.

Integrate cloud services with core business data. Today, companies manage vast quantities of customer data, which are often housed in different pockets across the organization. CX-focused CIOs will embrace IT’s unique position to first activate the cloud as way to share information across functional teams and then contribute its technical expertise to help employees understand what this data means for them and their customers.

A New Phase For Customer ExperienceTechnology companies who expect to generate new customers and continue to satisfy existing ones must seriously evaluate their current IT infrastructure and CX ecosystem and carefully, but quickly embrace the innovations of the cloud.

This is the first blog in a three-part series on how cloud technologies are transforming the customer experience and the ecosystem that surrounds it. Part 1 (this blog) discusses how the cloud changes the dynamics of business strategies and both challenges and presents new opportunities for CIOs and IT organizations. Part 2 will illustrate the cloud’s impact on how customers and companies digitally interact with each other. Finally, Part 3 will provide insights on how the cloud changes the ways employees and partners shape the customer experience.

Click here to learn more about EMC’s Total Customer Experience Program.

]]>https://infocus.dellemc.com/vj_manickam/cloud-and-the-customer-experience/feed/2https://infocus.dellemc.com/wp-content/themes/the-box/images/categories/service-excellence.pngWill Your Company Lead In 2020?https://infocus.dellemc.com/vj_manickam/will-company-lead-2020/
https://infocus.dellemc.com/vj_manickam/will-company-lead-2020/#commentsMon, 10 Nov 2014 13:15:10 +0000https://infocus.dellemc.com/?p=21292If you were asked what will be most important in the year 2020 to your business strategy—products, price or experience—what would you say? Based on a study by Walker Info, not only is experience more important today, but its significance will actually increase by 2020, whereas products and price will decrease. Based on these findings, […]

]]>If you were asked what will be most important in the year 2020 to your business strategy—products, price or experience—what would you say? Based on a study by Walker Info, not only is experience more important today, but its significance will actually increase by 2020, whereas products and price will decrease. Based on these findings, it is clear that companies who expect to remain competitive leaders need to focus on the customer experience. It is critical that companies are open to adapting their strategies and willing to invest in the technology, processes and people that will allow them to demonstrate and live up to their differentiated experience.

So how do cross-functional teams in a complex environment engage with and impact the customer experience? And why will those companies with a dedicated team of CX (customer experience) professionals lead the pack in 2020?

Through my work with EMC’s Total Customer Experience (TCE) team, I am fortunate to engage with cross-functional teams and understand the holistic customer lifecycle. The TCE team both aligns our internal teams and ensures that we strive to deliver a consistent and memorable experience throughout every interaction. By serving as the common thread to collect diverse data points and feedback from across the company, we can identify important trends—from educating the company on common challenges many of our customers are facing, as well as unique circumstances that may be impacting a specific account.

The best way to illustrate how multiple EMC teams touch the customer and collaborate to improve the experience is through an example with some of EMC’s largest Asia-Pacific customers.

The Situation:

Feedback from our APJ field teams (service and sales) and customer survey results indicated that EMC still has work to do with some of our largest customers in the region. Customers and employees noted opportunities to improve different aspects of the customer experience, such as: cross-functional EMC teamwork, account-based marketing, health/performance product statistics, handoffs in the service experience, regular business updates on strategy/roadmap directions and educational training workshops.

The Action:

The TCE team took a leadership role to use this feedback to conduct in-depth interviews with C-level leaders at 27 customer sites in 6 countries. Because of the TCE team’s proven expertise in listening to, analyzing and acting on feedback, we were able to identify 55 tangible improvements that would be meaningful to the target customers. We collaborated with the relevant EMC teams—marketing, sales, pre-sales, implementation, customer service and maintenance renewal sales—to share these improvements and develop a comprehensive action plan.

The Impact:

The impact of this targeted customer advocacy effort was extremely positive for both customers and the EMC teams aligned to them. As a result of the TCE deep dive visits, customer “perception of EMC” increased by 30+ points. We also saw a large increase in responses to EMC’s customer satisfaction surveys, which suggests that customers felt more confident that their feedback would be taken seriously.

Voice of Field surveys (sent to cross-functional EMC teams) revealed that 95% of respondents said that the TCE team insights had some impact on group strategy and 53% said the insights had significant impact. The teams also noted that the TCE approach also yielded additional benefits, such as: increased revenue, improved customer satisfaction, strengthened customer engagement and the ability to better integrate customer ideas into EMC’s product solutions and business model.

“The TCE [Asia] Pilot enabled us to further strengthen our understanding of the customers’ views and also enables us to focus on their priorities” – EMC Pre-Sales Member, Malaysia

Click to see more TCE stories, data, and programs on the Experience Analytics Showcase

There is no doubt that our customers’ needs and what they expect from their vendor’s cross-functional teams are changing. In recent years, trends such as social and mobile are fusing how customers’ access and use traditional information channels – such as the Internet, phone, print, and email – and also changing how customers want and expect to interact with their providers. Customers expect marketing and sales teams to understand their challenges and interests before they even take part in a sales call or visit the company’s website. They want these teams to deliver personalized insights, offer complete solutions (not just individual products) and help them compete better by saving time, money and effort. They expect technical pre-sales and service teams to not just understand the complexities of their products, but also know how their industry and IT environment are evolving. If during a service interaction the customer expresses a desire to expand their IT infrastructure, they want this information to be shared with their sales team without having to repeat it.

Companies who expect to win share of wallet and mind must adapt within each team function, as well as invest in the skills, technology and analytics capabilities to ensure that the customer experience is consistent no matter where the interaction takes place. At EMC, our dedicated TCE team has played a critical role in bridging gaps between internal teams and customers by leveraging analytics, proven feedback mechanisms and constant communication with our customers, employees and leaders. We know that there is always more work to do, but are committed to partnering with our customers to ensure that their experience with EMC is memorable and they are able to achieve their business goals. There is no substitute for employee passion and integrity–this video is just one example of how EMC employees from sales, services, engineering, marketing and other functional areas all care deeply about the customer experience.

At EMC, we believe we will lead in 2020 because of our relentless focus to the customer experience. What are you going to do for your customers?